Senator Owen Tovar blew out a long, low breath. “How did Delarosa know there was a nuke in a sunken ship?” He glanced at Haru Sato, the soldier who’d delivered the news, and then looked at the island’s intelligence officer, Mr. Mkele. “More to the point, how did you not know it?”

“I knew there was a sunken fleet,” said Mkele. “I had no idea it had been carrying a nuclear warhead.” Haru had always seen Mkele as a confident, capable man: terrifying when he and Haru were on different sides, fiercely reassuring when they were on the same one. Now, though, the intelligence officer seemed desperate and overwhelmed. Watching Mkele flounder for answers was even more disturbing, in its way, than the horrors that had brought them to this point.

“One of the people in Delarosa’s resistance group knew about it,” said Haru. “I don’t know who. It was some old navy guy.”

“And he’s kept it to himself all these years?” asked Tovar. “What, did he want it to be a surprise?”

Senator Hobb tapped the table. “He probably had the very understandable fear that if he told someone, they’d find it and try to use it. Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened.”